I requested this book for Christmas after hearing the author interviewed on CBC Radio’s The Current. Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs and the Improbable World of Peat is by Edward Struzik, a writer who focuses on a wide range of scientific and environmental issues. I was delighted to find it under the tree, read it within a couple of days and was not disappointed.

I am already a fan of wetlands, being lucky enough to live close to Tiny Marsh, one of the largest wetlands in Southern Ontario. Many’s the time a walk there has been interrupted by delight at the bugle call of a Trumpeter Swan, the colourful display of a flock of Bohemian Waxwings, the deadly appeal of a Pitcher Plant or the sweet emergence of tiny Snapping Turtles from their gravel-enclosed nest.

On occasion, I have had customers who actually own a wetland come by to choose from an exciting suite of plants - Silky Dogwood, Buttonbush, Cardinal Flower, Marsh Marigold, White Turtlehead, Blue Vervain, Green-headed Coneflower, Queen of the Prairie, Royal Fern… It’s been wonderful to think that they will be growing in optimal conditions and contributing to the restoration of habitat that is home to many rare and lovely plants and creatures.
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I collected many books for review in 2021, but time passed and this has been a year for choices, so just seven have made the cut. The writers, committed and knowledgeable, feel like old friends, even the ones I hadn’t read before. The first two books are not newly published - but they were new to me and when I read them earlier this year it was as if a jigsaw puzzle had fallen into place - the bits and pieces of knowledge I’d assembled so far on my gardening journey placed in a new and exciting context.

The Life of Plants - A Metaphysics of Mixture by Emanuele Coccia (Paperback 121 pp French edition 2016 English edition 2019 Polity Press $27.95).

“We barely speak of them and their names escape us,” philosopher / biologist Emanuele Coccia writes. “Philosophy has always overlooked them, more out of contempt than neglect. They are the cosmic ornament, the inessential and multicoloured accident that reigns in the margins of the cognitive field.

“The contemporary metropolis views them as superfluous trinkets of urban decoration. Outside the city walls, they are hosts - weeds - or objects of mass production.”
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A new customer came by last summer, having recently purchased a cottage property. Her neighbour had complained to the municipality about weeds that had sprung up on the previous owner’s vegetable patch. She told me some young people employed by the township arrived, armed with rulers, measured her weeds, found they were above the permitted height and told her she had to get rid of them.

She was upset, but complied, duly banishing the weeds and came to me, to purchase what I sell, native plants, that some might consider to be weeds, beautiful though they are. (Scroll to end for definitions).* 

I was glad that she was committed to a garden that would support biodiversity. I regretted not having been able to inventory her weeds before they were cleared out. Could there have been a rare grass there, or habitat for an endangered butterfly? Probably not, but it’s always good to check what nature has on offer before obliteration.

I was also annoyed by the imposition of an antiquated aesthetic standard on my customer. Because that’s what this was about - aesthetics. The township enforcers weren’t compiling a species list to determine if the weeds were harmful or invasive, they were measuring.

It’s not as if this wasn’t settled 25 years ago when Toronto resident Sandy Bell appealed her conviction for having violated Toronto’s weeds and grass bylaw.

“I think it is apparent that one of the purposes of the by-law, indeed its primary purpose, is to impose on all property owners the conventional landscaping practices considered by most people to be desirable, and that one of its effects is to prevent naturalized gardens which reflect other, less conventional values,” wrote Justice David Fairgrieve in 1996, finding that Bell’s constitutional right to freedom of expression had been violated.

Bell had won the right to express her environmental beliefs through gardening. It was a landmark ruling.
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